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President at Prescient Digital Media
Consultant
Top 5Leaderboard
The SharePoint Intranet – Pros and Cons

SharePoint has conquered the enterprise intranet. Although the conquest is never as bloody nor expensive as more invasive conquests, such as the Mongols under Genghis Khan, intranet citizens are not always thrilled by the new system and structure under Gates Khan.

SharePoint is present in about 90% of the Fortune 100; and plays a prominent intranet role in about 70% of knowledge worker intranets (either powering the main intranet portal, or delivering associated collaboration sites and/or document repositories). This in spite of its history.

SharePoint 2007 was a dog; SharePoint 2010 was a dressed-up dog; but SharePoint 2013 represented a leap forward to a more user-friendly, true web platform. SharePoint 2016 saw improvements, but perhaps the most significant advances have come in the last couple of years with the release and evolution of SharePoint online (and eventually SharePoint 2019) with the advent of Office 365.

SharePoint Online, and the on-premises version SharePoint 2019 (though the Online version is constantly being updated and improved upon) represent considerable improvement to a a very usable, complex digital workplace solution. SharePoint Online Modern Experience has become a truly mobile friendly solution, with a number of improvements to collaboration (particularly Teams and a dedicated mobile app) and for hybrid cloud scenarios.

There are a lot of reasons to buy into or upgrade to Online or 2019: the latest iteration of Microsoft’s portal-web development platform represents a massive, multi-million dollar upgrade on the previous versions of SharePoint (a version that was typically oversold given its underwhelming if not frustrating performance and lack of execution). SharePoint Online and 2019 are massive upgrade from 2013: noticeable improvements to social computing (social networking via Delve and Teams), mobile computing (responsive design with "modern" pages and a dedicated mobile app), better Office integration, Teams, cloud and hybrid integration, search and more.

But it’s not all good news, and it’s not a solution that fits every organization.

Here at Prescient Digital Media, we upgraded move to SharePoint Online in Office 365 (which is more feature and functionally rich than SharePoint 2019). Though some problems persist, the bugs and challenges are not as persistent as versions 2013 and 2016. There are some obvious improvements (pros) and some persistent issues (cons): 

  • Cloud – you no longer need to worry about patches, maintenance and security; Microsoft takes care of this for you
  • Mobile – enhanced mobile access experience with completely responsive sites and apps, and dedicated single sign-on apps for each of the tools in the Office 365 toolset
  • Social – enhanced social networking via Delve, Teams and Yammer
  • Web CMS – enhanced publishing and management interface (employing the ‘ribbon’ from Office)
  • Branding – the new "modern pages" are slick and responsive; it can be more challenging to implement new custom designs using the new modern pages versus classic, and MS has openly cautioned against customizing the home page
  • Search – search is much improved with the full integration with the FAST search engine, but requires some configuration work

There are far more pros than cons, but there should be at the price MS charges. SharePoint is very good for a small to medium-size intranet in a .NET environment that requires a web development platform focused on enterprise content management. In some scenarios, SharePoint can excel as a large enterprise intranet, but it can cause headaches if its overly customized .But it is not cheap, typically requires a lot of work and customization, and doesn’t always work as promised.

Speaking of conquest, the Chinese learned Mongol lessons the hard way, and built the Great Wall. Although a firewall is requisite with any intranet, not just a SharePoint intranet, walls kill collaboration and employee knowledge management. More salient, key lessons can be drawn from implementing and working with SharePoint:

  • Licensing represents a fraction of the cost
  • Planning and governance are mission critical – mission critical
  • Custom or third-party web parts and applications can really enhance the experience
  • Social collaboration doesn’t just happen, it’s earned
  • Change management is the key to success

For more information see the SharePoint For Communicators white paper, at www.PrescientDigital.com.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
President at Prescient Digital Media
Consultant
Top 5Leaderboard
Plan, plan, plan. Over-budget.

There are in fact two versions of SharePoint: the on-premises version, SharePoint 2019, and SharePoint Online, which comes bundled in Microsoft 365 (the Cloud). Though those with Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) automatically have the latest features in SharePoint Online; those with on-premises SharePoint, have to wait for the next release to get the latest and greatest.

SharePoint’s greatest strength is it’s an all-in-one approach – it’s a portal, a content management system, a search engine, a social collaboration platform, a web development platform, and so much more. Its greatest weakness is that it’s an all-in-one solution – everything and the kitchen sink; a jack-of-all-trades, a master of none. Some argue that SharePoint is a “mile wide, but a foot deep.” It offers so much, but some features are seen as still ‘developing’ or even sub-par. But there are a lot of tools and features, and with each release, it gets better and better (though more complex).

“With Microsoft 365, Microsoft currently offers the most powerful communication and collaboration suite on the market. And the latest announcements from the Microsoft Ignite conference across the main workloads like SharePoint, Teams and Powell Apps prove that they continue to move forward fast in order to stay ahead of the game,” says Antoine Faisandier, CEO of Powell Software, a Digital Workplace software that extends and enhances the Office 365 capabilities.

It’s important to note that SharePoint is still a technology. It doesn’t include all of the people, process and planning that is required to make any intranet technology work. Intranet technology will fail without careful planning, process and committed people. Most of the key ingredients of a successful intranet in the digital workplace are based on people, and process; technology is merely an enabler.

Among the latest features, building upon earlier versions of SharePoint:

  1. Delve / My Profile (About Me) - My Sites disappears in favor of a new profile, About Me, that also uses the Delve inference engine.
  2. Cloud / Hybrid - Hybrid enables you to integrate your on-premises farm with the cloud, at your own pace.
  3. Durable Links - Resource-based URLs now retain links when documents are renamed or moved in SharePoint.
  4. Image and video previews - Preview images and videos in SharePoint Server 2016 document libraries.
  5. Large files - now supports uploading and downloading files larger than 2,047 MBs
  6. Mobile - an improved mobile navigation experience.
  7. Search - SharePoint Search has now fully integrated the FAST Search engine, with more features, and indexes up to 500 milliion documents (per app).
  8. Sharing - better user sharing options, including a Shared folder, and invitation email notifications.
  9. Microsoft Teams - online communication platform for team or project sites, akin to an enhanced Team Site, but with chat, presence, inline calling and messaging, and integration with Outlook and Calendar and most other apps. It now includes voice mail.


We are Intranet consultants (www.PrescientDigital.com) and and principally use Microsoft 365 - SharePoint Online for Enterprise Content Management; improving the way our organization functions in terms of employee collaboration and knowledge sharing specifically via document management, and social collaboration (discussion groups, profiles and blogging being the most used social tools). Increasingly we use Teams, and use it with external clients that can be invited to a specific Team (project site).

Web content management and social media tools (e.g. wikis) are not best-of-breed, and usability is an issue with many features. We also encountered many, many problems with deployment -- customization and implementation requires more work than you expect. Additionally, like most organizations, a customized user experience can break (particularly specific webparts) with every SharePoint patch and upgrade. However, we found no issues with stability or scalability. 

80% of our clients use SharePoint, and probably some 85% of the Fortune 1000 use SharePoint in some shape or form. We are first and foremost SharePoint intranet consultants, so we build and design other intranets, and need to deeply understand the ins and outs of SharePoint. 

The initial setup of SharePoint is very easy - out-of-the-box deployment is simple, fast and a novice could manage a deployment. Customization requires a lot of work, particularly using SPFx (hiring an outside expert is strongly recommended).

A note of caution: planning is everything. The intranet is more about people and process, and any intranet requires a through plan -- for information architecture, content management, design, and change management -- plan, plan, plan. And plan to run over-budget (unless you hire very strong outside experts to develop and run your plan and budget) for customization activities. 

SharePoint 2019
SharePoint 2019

SharePoint features major upgrades to the user experience design and mobile access, including a new dedicated SharePoint app. The UX for SharePoint 2019 is noticeably superior to previous versions of SP. It’s very clean and modern, with a major emphasis on images, and video. The new "modern UX" is fully responsive, and has it's own dedicated mobile app.

“SharePoint 2019 has the most UX (improvements) than we’ve ever delivered before in a SharePoint release,” Hani Loza, of the Microsoft SharePoint team, on www.IntranetBlog.com.

Among the new UX features, particularly noticeable in the new SharePoint Communications Sites, are drag-and-drop web parts for image galleries, slideshows, hero slideshow, and video.

Continue reading: The New SharePoint: SharePoint 2019

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.